New School Politics

If you're a first time visitor, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed, which will keep you up to date with all the latest New School Politics posts. Thanks for visiting!

Here is an eye-popping link enumerating scores of different trends which have been linked to global warming.

Some of my personal favorites: rape, suicide, teen drinking, terrorism, child insomnia, less circumcision, polar bear cannibalism, poisonous spiders invading Scotland, rainfall increase, rainfall decrease, more colorful trees, less colorful trees, taller mountains, smaller mountains, and, best of all, another ice age.

The climate change sensation is prevalent in contemporary culture, and while the pressure is strong to hop on the band-wagon, any independent and rational thinker will notice it wreaks of dubious logic and claims. For instance, the current Secretary-General of the UN blames global warming as the primary culprit in the Darfur conflict. And, while the Sudanese campaign has been motivated in part by desertification of land in the north, it is giant leap to blame global warming for local weather trends. Not to mention the fact that by blaming climate change you are invariably evading the real issue which is that no government or people have the right to systematically violate people’s lives and property in the manner that the Sudanese government is doing.

An articulate editorial in the WSJ today posits how mob mentality may be perpetuating the matter:

How this honor has befallen the former Veep could perhaps be explained by another Nobel, awarded in 2002 to Daniel Kahneman for work he and the late Amos Tversky did on “availability bias,” roughly the human propensity to judge the validity of a proposition by how easily it comes to mind.

Their insight has been fruitful and multiplied: “Availability cascade” has been coined for the way a proposition can become irresistible simply by the media repeating it; “informational cascade” for the tendency to replace our beliefs with the crowd’s beliefs; and “reputational cascade” for the rational incentive to do so.

Mr. Gore clearly understands the game he’s playing, judging by his resort to such nondispositive arguments as: “The people who dispute the international consensus on global warming are in the same category now with the people who think the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona.”

Two things to remember are, a) its bad when open, rational debate is not tolerated and people blindly follow the leader and b) environmentalist politics are consequential and if people truly accept the idea that there are catastrophic warming trends, logically, regulations will follow that could severely hamstring the economy by attacking both its energy sources and its related price system.

The fact remains that the scientific data does not add up to the earth melting. For one, humans contribute a very small fraction of the greenhouse effect (try less than 2%). Moreover, the earth warmed more during the first half of the twentieth century then the second half and actually cooled for much of the period from the 50s-80s (hence, the “global cooling” scare), all the while industrial emissions were increasing steadily.

Such inconsistencies, among others, are not addressed in the mainstream. A documentary released in the UK in the past year called “The Great Global Warming Swindle” is a very informative source. Ultimately it demonstrates that “the debate” is not over–as a matter of fact, it has never even started–and that before we do anything too crazy the world should start openly and freely discussing the issue.

ADDENDUM: In a comment, Simmons said he did not believe me when I said that human contribution to the Greenhouse effect was just about 2% of the total greenhouse effect. While it is difficult to measure the exact contribution of humans, even what I consider generous estimates, measure human contribution at no more that 2 and a fraction %. From Junk Science:

Humans can only claim responsibility, if that’s the word, for abut 3.4% of carbon dioxide emitted to the atmosphere annually, the rest of it is all natural (you can see the IPCC representation of the natural carbon cycle and human perturbation here or a simple schematic from Woods Hole here).

Half our estimated emissions fail to accumulate in the atmosphere, “disappearing” into sinks as yet undetermined. Humans’ total accumulated carbon contribution could account for perhaps a quarter of the total non-water greenhouse gases (that is, accounting for all the increase since the Industrial Revolution regardless of source and irrespective of whether warming from any cause might result in an increase in natural emission to atmosphere — we’re simply claiming the lot as anthropogenic or human-caused here).

Assuming that water vapor accounts for about 70% and clouds (mostly water droplets) accounts for another 20%, thus water in it’s various forms is 90% of the total greenhouse effect, leaving 10% for non-water greenhouse effect (we know we cited 95% above — see “important distinction“). Of this remaining 10%, mainly atmospheric carbon, humans might be responsible for 25% of the total accumulated atmospheric carbon, meaning 0.25 x 0.1 = 0.025 x 100 = 2.5% of the total greenhouse effect.

Within the given range, 2.5% is the maximum estimation because  it used the maximum estimates of CO2’s greenhouse composition and human emmisions of C02. Being that CO2 may be as little as 4 or 5% of the greenhouse effect, and humans may contribute as little as 3.4% of CO2, a reasonable estimate would also pin human greenhouse effect as low as (.034 x .05) .17%.

Last 5 posts by Ryan

• Scarcity, Shmarcity - June 26th, 2008
• The Greatness of Southpaws - June 26th, 2008
• Step One: Open mouth... - June 23rd, 2008
• Sobering Statistics and Economic Commentary - June 11th, 2008
• Obama: Humbly setting out to save the world - June 8th, 2008

Popularity: 61% [?]

The Everything is caused by global warming by New School Politics, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.